Rich Ricci, the former chief executive of Barclays’ corporate and investment bank and once right-hand man of Bob Diamond, has emerged as the third-largest shareholder in fledgling European trading venue Aquis Exchange.

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Ricci, an acquaintance of Aquis' founder and chief executive Alasdair Haynes, has taken a stake of just over 10% in Aquis, according to company filings published this week. The shareholder list is accurate as of December 31, 2013, according to a spokeswoman for Aquis who declined to comment further.

A spokesman for Ricci did not return calls for comment in time for publication.

Financial News first reported last year that both Ricci and Diamond were in talks to invest in the London-based platform, which launched trading in UK, French and Dutch stocks at the end of 2013. Diamond held no stake on December 31, the filings show.

The filing is the first time Aquis' full shareholder list has been disclosed publicly.

The platform's biggest shareholder is the Warsaw Stock Exchange, with a 21% stake. Haynes holds around 13% of the group's equity. Other minority shareholders include Quote Africa, a fledgling pan-African exchange operator, and Mark Spanbroek, a high-profile industry executive and vice-chairman of Europe's high-frequency trading lobby group the FIA European Principal Traders' Association.

Aquis launched trading in some UK, French and Dutch stocks in November. Its initial clients comprised around 11 brokers, proprietary trading firms and market makers, Haynes told Financial News at the time. The venue hopes to grow its member base to around 30 by the end of the first quarter in 2014, he said.

The market will be the first in Europe to use a subscription-based pricing tariff. After an initial price promotion, users can either pay £2,000 per month to send an average of 25,000 messages to the Aquis system per day, or £10,000 for the ability to send an unlimited number of messages, subject to a fair usage policy.

A message can include a request sent to Aquis to buy or sell a stock, modify an existing order, or cancel an order.

Aquis’ fee structure is a departure from the maker-taker pricing used by many of Europe’s alternative trading venues. The maker-taker model charges users for orders that remove liquidity from an order book, while offering rebates for orders that add liquidity.

The new venture will also aim to build revenues by selling its trading technology and has already sold a trading system to Quote Africa.